Where to start?

Understand

Uncover the ABCs of Empathy Platform: grasp the core principles, learn the essential concepts, master basic elements, and unlock advanced search features to optimize your product search and discovery experience within your commerce store.

Onboard

Get started on your journey with a comprehensive step-by-step guide to have Empathy Platform up and running in your commerce store effortlessly.

Play

Dive deep into the Empathy Platform Playboard and learn how to use search and discovery analytics & insights, fine-tuning tools, and search explainability features.

Develop

Plunge towards technical product documentation. Explore UI and API references and guides to learn the inner workings of Empathy Platform and assemble your search and discovery experience.

Video Library

Map

Blog

What's new

Relevant topics

AI-assisted search features AI Mode Conversational search Integrate into VTEX AI Carousels Search approaches AI infrastructure Interface X Components injection Self-managed Components Insights Semantics dataviz Semantics API Semantic search Search relevance Search data privacy Keyword search Semantics recommendations Prepare your catalog Product catalog fields Tagging integration UI reference API references

Last doc updates

Tue 22 Sep, 2026

AI Spell Check

Published the AI Spell Check overview to introduce the new lexical and semantic query correction layers.

Fri 28 Aug, 2026

Conversational search

Published Connect AI Mode to your commerce store's domain guide to learn how to create your subdomain for AI Mode.

Conversational search

Updated Discover AI Mode page to clarify AI Mode's subdomain-based access.

Fri 7 Aug, 2026

Semantic search

Moved the Understand semantic search doc set from About Empathy Platform to Understand search.

Semantic search

Updated the Understand search in Empathy Platform landing page with semantic search information.

Keyword search

Published Discover keyword search in Empathy Platform landing page to walk through the most traditional search type and its key features.

Keyword search

Updated the Understand search in Empathy Platform landing page to link to keyword search documentation.

What's new in Empathy Platform

September 22, 2026

Spell Check gets a semantic layer

Shoppers make typos when typing what they're looking for in the search bar, and until now, when a search returned no results because of one, Empathy Platform's Spell Check corrected it by spelling alone, taking advantage of Elasticsearch's own suggester capabilities.

Empathy Platform introduces AI Spell Check, a rebuilt correction engine that combines two layers.

The lexical layer builds on that same spelling-based approach, but now runs against a standalone embeddings feed generated from your catalog, so corrections stay more consistently tied to what shoppers can actually buy...

Read more

July 28, 2026

AI Related Tags ships on a new pipeline

Since its introduction, AI Related Tags have helped commerce stores extend related tag coverage beyond what organic behavioral data alone can provide. The initial implementation (v0) was built on top of the Related Prompts pipeline, which, while effective, carried a higher compute and LLM cost per client. That version is now being decommissioned.

Empathy Platform introduces AI Related Tags v1, a rebuilt implementation that shares the same generation pipeline as AI Next Queries...

Read more

Jun 26, 2026

X-Controls: configure your entire search UI from one place

The Instance Management Console (IMC) is where you configure and manage your Empathy Platform instance. Starting today, the new X-Controls section extends the IMC to your entire search UI: configure your search UI's behavior, layout, and branding, plus the query preview carousels that recommend products to shoppers, all from a single configuration form.

From the Playboard's IMC you can set general settings to control the core behavior of your search layer. For example, decide whether to activate...

Read more